Ed: So after not having much luck with pitching my thesis as a freelance piece, I’m making my Master’s thesis on the Chinatown bus scene in New York publicly available. If any magazine/newspaper editor reads this and wants to publish it, talk to me. Until then, enjoy.
Ho, 28, runs his single van and three buses on the weekend along his New York – Boston route. Boston Deluxe is the upstart on this route. His two competitors are much larger companies, Lucky Star and Fung Wah. These established Chinatown bus companies operate 15 and 18 trips respectively, leaving at least once an hour from 7 am to 11 pm in each direction. “They’re slick,” Ho comments, while driving from Hartford to Boston one February morning. “I gotta be slicker.”
He says that Fung Wah is his “greatest competition.” That’s why he only operates on the weekends, when there is more demand. He’d lose money trying to operate during the week when up against Fung Wah’s 18 daily buses.
“To take out Fung Wah, that’s no problem,” Ho says flippantly. “But that’s going to take time.”
Although he has a few other drivers, Ho himself makes three round-trips on the 200-mile journey between Boston and New York each weekend, including a stop in Hartford. He serves as investor, owner, driver, baggage handler, customer service agent, and press officer all at once. Ho’s eyes scan constantly for an opening in an adjacent lane, adapting and moving as needed. Occasionally, his Nextel phone rings, and a voice from another world squawks at him. He switches from English to Chinese effortlessly. Sometimes it’s the other drivers, or his longtime girlfriend, Sybil Cheung Ð who acts as a dispatcher Ð or sometimes it’s customers, trying to get information.
Sitting behind Jack Ho seats are a group of college students Ð none of them Chinese Ð in three rows of cramped vinyl seats. They are chatting away on their cell phones or absorbed in the aural world of their iPods. The van is not built for comfort, but rather for efficiency and speed. Some try to sleep, others try to read, and still others try to write on laptops, forced to cramp their elbows as to not obstruct their seatmates. All they care about is getting to their destination quickly. Most of them know that taking Boston Deluxe’s van service means speed, when compared to other local regional bus service, such as Greyhound. With a van, Ho can reach Boston from Hartford in roughly 90 minutes. The same trip on a bus would take at least an extra half hour.
“You see that bus over there?” he says while driving, an air of annoyance in his voice.
Ho points to a bus in the distance on a stretch of Interstate 90 in southeastern Massachusetts. The bus is a few hundred yards down the road, barely visible. It was one of the rival Chinatown buses, most likely Lucky Star.
“How fast do you think he’s going?” he says rhetorically.
A quick glance at Ho’s speedometer shows he is holding steady at 80 mph. The bus farther is probably at 85 mph. He shakes his head at this example of what he considers to be irresponsible driving.
“I’m doing 80 and I can’t catch up with him,” he says. “If it was raining, he’s be sliding already. If it was snowing, he’d be dead.”
As he made his way along the interstate, Jack Ho told his story. He was born in Taiwan but was raised in New York’s East Village. As such, Jack Ho speaks English with only a hint of an accent. He started in the business five years ago working as a driver for his father’s company, Dragon Coach. Within two and a half years he’d worked his way up to manager. He was 25.
But eventually, Jack Ho reached a point where he split off from his father to start his own company in 2003. At this point in the story, the usually gregarious entrepreneur, who prides himself on customer service, became curt and vague.
“I wanted to do it myself,” he says, while driving steadily toward Boston. “My English is better than his. I don’t like relying on anybody.” Jack Ho remained confident that he could build from the lessons he learned working long hours at his father’s Chinatown office.
“His [buses] always broke down Ð not mine,” he says. That’s all he’ll say.
Jack Ho added that he and his father, Edward Ho, don’t see much of each anymore. However, a few weeks ago, they attended a bus convention in Las Vegas together.
Continue reading . . .
For those of you wanting to make a statement about exerting your constitutional rights over unwarranted search and seizure (ie, if you’re riding the NY subway these days), you can sport these cool-looking shoulder bags that have the Fourth Amendment printed right on the side.
Because the the 
